The Man of Gold Read Online Free

small were they indeed that Captain Fulcher broke out in protest.
    ‘I say, my dear fellow, give a chap a little more, won’t you? When a chap’s been at the races all day he gets a devilish sharp appetite.’
    His host gave him a long look.
    ‘Meat costs money, my dear sir,’ he replied at last. ‘I tell you, we do not eat as well every day in this house.’
    Miss Unwin once more felt a lurch of dismay. She was not eating well now, not at all. Food as poor as this had not been put before her since she had left, many years ago it seemed, the workhouse that had been her earliest home. Was she now going to have to endure years of such austerity? And winters in rooms as cold as her bedroom above?
    But the meat was at least rather more easy to eat thanthe soup had been to drink, and she devoured her portion and the black-marked potatoes that went with it with something approaching eagerness.
    But her hunger was not allayed. Would there be something in the nature of a pudding? Surely with guests at the table there must be.
    She was not, however, to learn how far Mr Partington’s unwilling hospitality stretched.
    Before the shrunken old man had finished his own mutton – and Miss Unwin had observed that at least he had carved for himself no more than he had been willing to carve for others – his head suddenly jerked forward and struck the surface of the table in front of him, sending his plate with its few remains of hoarded meat skittering to the side.
    Once more that moan of pain escaped his lips.
    Richard Partington jumped from his chair.
    ‘Father,’ he said, ‘this cannot go on. You are ill. Seriously ill. You must call the doctor.’
    Slowly the old man forced his body into a half-upright position.
    ‘Ill?’ he ground out. ‘I am not ill and well you know it. I am being poisoned. Poisoned. And no doctor is going to find a medicine that will put an end to that.’

Chapter Three
    It seemed to Miss Unwin, looking back at the start of her life in the shabby house next to the pin factory, that the first evening she spent there had within it the whole pattern of her existence afterwards. The bone-chilling cold, the grim sparseness of the meals, the embittered meanness of old Mr Partington with the half-hidden sweet apologetic smiles of his son, and, running through it all, the old man’s sharp bouts of painful illness.
    Another note that varied as little was his adamant refusal to have the doctor called. True, he did not repeat, at least in Miss Unwin’s hearing, the claim that he was being poisoned, and she came at that period to believe the words he had gasped out at the dinner table on her first evening under his roof were no more than so much unthinking fury, though later she was to recall them vividly enough.
    But in the days and weeks that followed that first appalling, unforgettable meal the memory of that particular moment slipped into oblivion. Other meals, even less appetising, even more parsimonious, put that first one into the shade.
    On all occasions when there were no visitors, and the Fulchers were the only ones ever to cross the threshold of the cold, uncared for house, only one course was served at dinner. It was almost always the same, largely potatoes, generally some other vegetable – whatever was cheapest in the market, Miss Unwin soon decided – and with those a little meat, which usually Mrs Meggs served to old Mr Partington alone.
    This had happened at the second dinner Miss Unwin ate in the house.
    Mrs Meggs came into the dining room with her tray on which there were two dishes, one containing a fair quantity of boiled potatoes, though already Miss Unwin could see that they were more black than white, and the other with a lesser quantity of dark coarse cabbage. But in addition there was one plate on which there lay some meat. Miss Unwin, hungry after a small breakfast and as small a lunch, could not refrain from looking with more closeness than was properly polite at what they were to